May each breath you take today be infused with the sweetness of life. 🙂

Trees are such spiritually sophisticated beings. I’m really grooving on them lately!

This piece started as a doodle. I had done some prayer work involving tree imagery for my friend Tanya English (a gifted healer, by the way, who does remote as well as in-person healings) a while back and she had an amazing connection with a golden Maple tree. She had asked me to do a piece of Maple art for her, but it didn’t come right away.

Then a short while back I started doodling on a long phone call, and this emerged. I hope to have time some day to use it as the basis for a watercolor. Tanya couldn’t wait, though, and printed it out as a coloring sheet!

My friend Lisa Berman has Dragon energy. (Yes, I can feel it!) I am working on a Dragon logo for her to use on her website (she is an intuitive healer, and a gifted one. She is working with high-energy people like athletes and CEOs to help them improve their performance – what a great match to her power animal!)

Here is the original, which I did in watercolor (I removed the background in Photoshop):

Getting it into Photoshop was no mean trick. Usually it’s easy to remove backgrounds, but I tend to work loosely and in this case there were a lot of gradual transitions between object and ground. So I had to create an extra layer on top and carefully outline the dragon, then select the negative spaces and delete them from the art layer beneath. It would certainly make more sense to be more precise from the beginning, but then again that might force me to work tighter and lose the energy of the piece. In the end, all’s well that ends well.

Now that I’ve got the thing digital, it’s easy to play with options. Like different colored dragons. Here it is in red, yellow, and blue:

It will be interesting to see what direction she’s interested in pursuing. Some of the colored dragons will have to be enhanced further if they’re going to work well as a final piece (for instance, I’m not too wild about the green tongue on the blue dragon!) 🙂

It looks like Christmas here in Michigan’s UP, after a winter storm dumped about two feet of snow on us in 24 hours.

After all the digging (and swearing), it’s nice to sit back and appreciate the beauty of this time of year. There’s something dreamlike about it that, if you’re not careful, can get you thinking in stream-of-consciousness sorts of ways.

So…the snow made me think of the holidays, which brought to mind this painting I did quite a few years back, when we lived in Vernon County, WI.

Bright Spirits, watercolor and gouache, 10″x 17″

Yes, that is Amish country, and these are Amish horses. Big, placid, gentle Belgians, taking a break outside their barn one summer day as my husband and I were visiting their owners. (I changed it to a winter scene later. Who says there’s no magic in the world?)

Anyway, this painting in turn reminded me of another story from that era, which is the real reason I’m writing this post.

We were visiting another couple and admiring their beautiful new barn. Upon close inspection, the barn appeared to be made from top-quality, cabinet-grade old growth oak.

“It’s gorgeous, but why did you use such beautiful wood for a barn?” my husband asked the man.

“Well,” he replied, “the wood was growing on our own property. It was cheaper to hire the Amish to mill it for us than to go to the lumber yard and buy wood from somewhere else.”

Makes sense. But I wonder, how many people these days might have simply driven to Home Depot and purchased wood rather than look around to see what was available for the taking?

The thing is, it takes a little bit of imagination to look at a tree and see a barn. And you have to be willing to seek out those with the know-how to help you transform the one into the other.

Ask yourself: What treasures might be growing in your own backyard? Would you recognize their worth if you saw them? And who are the human treasures you know who might help you find them?

I’ve had the idea for this one kicking around for a while. Actually it dates back to a piece I did way back when, just out of college, with a woman’s silhouetted profile and leaves blowing in the wind.

Now she’s back. The picture here is the initial “sketch” in Photoshop. I suspect I’ll be changing the landscape a bit and maybe adding a few wind turbines. I’ll post more as she progresses.

Like this:

I just started a new Meetup group for creative people in the Champaign-Urbana, IL area. I’m calling it Wild Woman’s Wolf Pack and it’s just a monthly (more or less) gathering for creative inspiration – where artists, writers, musicians, businesspeople and other creative women & men can get together and inspire each other through sharing and encouragement.